Arena Blog

1factory. One Product Development Solution to Love. Manufacturing Is Gonna Be All Right.

In early November, Arena announced a partnership with 1factory to provide OEMs with complete visibility of product
quality from initial design through the quality control processes on their
factory floors and across their supply chain.

With this partnership, customers have
an end-to-end quality control solution capable of identifying non conformance
to specifications early in the design/manufacture process and can accelerate
the necessary corrective actions averting the dreaded ‘line-down’ or massive
product recalls.

This partnership continues to strengthen Arena’s overarching goal of offering innovative companies the holy
grail of an all-in-one product development platform that eliminates the need to
bandage together siloed systems that cause blind spots, data duplication and
barriers to collaboration.

We recently spoke with 1factory’s President
Nipun Girotra to get his thoughts on the world of product design and
manufacturing. In this three-part blog post series, you’ll discover the
challenges facing most global manufacturers and the keys to success.

Arena:1factory is a company with an
unconventional name. Could you share what you do?

Girotra: Modern manufacturing requires the
successful exchange of data and orchestration of work across hundreds of
physical factories. Our goal at 1factory is to deliver a line of products that
helps manufacturers exchange data and work with their suppliers as though they
are one virtual factory.

Our first product is a feature-level or
parameter-level quality control solution, designed to help manufacturers of
complex products control product quality at the source (within their factories
and across their supply chain). With 1factory’s quality control solution,
manufacturers can speedup inspections and improve product quality.

Arena: Increasing product complexity (product
variants, number of parts, and number of features) and increasing supply chain
complexity (number of suppliers, number of hand-offs / tiers and the global
spread) make product quality control very challenging. Do you agree?

Girotra: Yes. Bringing new products to market
now requires flawless execution of hundreds and often thousands of product
parameters within the factory and across the supply chain. Product parameters
that must be controlled include raw material specifications, dimensional
specifications, special processing requirements (e.g. heat-treatment,
anodization, cleaning, coloring etc.) and functional parameters (e.g. voltage,
speed, torque etc.).

Arena: In many companies, quality control data
is still being collected on paper with spreadsheets and compiled into reports
to meet customer-specific or industry-specific compliance requirements. A lot of data is
being generated — thousands of spreadsheets are created each year — but almost
none of the data is being analyzed in real-time or oftentimes not conjoined up
and down the enterprise to truly extract the analytical benefits from it
holistically.

Girotra: That’s because the QC department is
under pressure to inspect, create a compliance report and ship product. There’s
never enough time to analyze the data or to feed back the findings to the
manufacturing floor.

Arena: It appears factory managers lack
visibility into the defect-risk-levels of their shipments. They also have to
manually go through hundreds of spreadsheets a day and often learn about
manufacturing defects only when their customers complain.

Girotra: Yes. At the customer’s end, defective
components disrupt production, delay shipments and result in wasted capacity.
And often these defective parts make their way to the end customer directly
through the spare-parts supply chain.

Arena: Many industries also suffer from the
hidden costs of high variability.

Girotra: As an example, in the semiconductor
equipment industry, inadequate supplier controls result in part-to-part
variability and process control problems. Similarly, in the industrial
equipment industry, components see high levels of operating stresses, and high
component variability results in degraded performance and early-life failure.

And most importantly, a single defect can put a customers’ health and safety at risk, and result in expensive reputation
damaging recalls and litigation.

Now, wasn’t this blog post a complete bummer?
Well, tune in next week when we discuss how Arena’s partnership with 1factory
helps overcome the multitude of challenges that modern manufacturers face.